The Inquisition: Salvarius Ilsk of the Ordo Xenos
by hrnelson99
Summary: The function of the Emperor's Ordo Xenos is to protect mankind from the predation of the abominable alien. Salvarius Ilsk is an Inquisitor of that righteous Ordo, and this tale recounts his journey into the Arcadian Reaches to uncover a cataclysmic threat to the Imperium and discover the fate of his erstwhile mentor.
1. Chapter 1

+++ In Orbit of Hive-World Narsi-Cola +++

 _The soul of an Inquisitor is a thing of beauty and grace, forged from the greatest of mankind's virtues: arrogance, hatred, belligerence, and, most importantly of all, faith in the God Emperor of Mankind._

 _Arch Ecclesiarch of Shrine World Hetepus, M35_

The old woman sitting at the desk of polished Tanith wood at the end of the long, vaulted chamber pressed a hidden stud beneath her workspace; on the opposite side of the chamber, a pair of brass doors four men high hushed open. The woman inked the final touches on an assassination warrant for a troublesome Rogue Trader before slowly raising her hooded eyes. She observed the man that entered her sanctum: she noticed the awkwardness in his gait, which suggested a bionic left leg with a faulty hip connection; the chain sword and bolt pistol on his belt lacked any gilding or decoration, and bespoke of a utilitarian outlook that made the old woman nod slightly in approval. It took the man several minutes to make it to the seated crone, his gaze wandering amongst the tapestries and holopicts that hung and glowed respectively on the walls between massive armaglass windows. Apocalyptic scenes of alien nightmares being broken on the hammer of Imperial forces was a common theme, and the man appreciated that were it not for the Inquisitorial Rosarius around his neck he would be killed for knowing the events recorded had ever transpired. He had been taken off off the path of comfortable ignorance a lifetime ago, as it was his grim burden to intimately understand the horrors mankind faced.

"I am Inquisitor Salvarius Ilsk, and I have come here to answer your summons, Lord Inquisitor," boomed Salvarius when he stopped a good fifty feet from the woman's desk. His lack of a bow or suitable display of fealty to his superior would have made the Lord Inquisitor's hair stand on end, but over her career she had come to appreciate the self-righteous nature of her direct subordinates and peers left little room in their personality for politeness. "What could be so important as to call me away from my work in the Sub-Sector Mamam, right as my acolytes were about to excise a hive of the Genestealer strain!" The old woman narrowed her augmetic eyes, but otherwise remained stoic.

"I would first remind you of the personage you are addressing, Salvarius, and that it is at best unbecoming to bark at your superiors like a common mongrel," said the Lord Inquisitor with a tone that lacked any menace, but nevertheless promised unknowable cruelty if the advice was not taken. Salvarius remained unflagging, with a righteous anger simmering just below the surface of his gruff but statuesque features. A pause was born and stretched out as both individuals waited for the other to back down; neither so much as blinked. The Lord Inquisitor sniffed derisively, "Your mentor was right about you: always the first to speak his mind, and the last to back down."

"You have spoken with Inquisitor Vladimir?" asked Salvarius with a hint of shock.

"Yes. Vladimir resurfaced briefly after his sixteen-year long mission in the Arcadian Reaches. Two weeks prior, when I summoned you via astropathic communique, he stood in this very chamber and delivered some disturbing revelations to the Inquisition." Salvarius' indignation at being summoned from his duties was long forgotten, and he was subconsciously leaning forward with keen interest. "What he said is only known to me and my closest peers and is of such critical strategic value that the information in its entirety cannot be trusted to anyone else. Know then that what your mentor revealed has forced me to redeploy you immediately to the Arcadian Reaches." Salvarius was silent for a moment.

"Will I be joining my mentor in the Reaches?" he finally asked, "And will I be able to call my acolytes away from their current assignment in Mamam?

"Yes and no. Your acolytes will remain in Mamam and finish the xeno threat their before it metastasizes to other worlds, but you will be joining with Vladimir and doubtlessly be able to utilize his resources." The younger Inquisitor was about to ask a question when the ancient woman held up her hand, "and no, I cannot tell you what your mentor has discovered. The risk of the information reaching the wrong parties is too great, but Vladimir will fill you in when you arrive at your rendezvous point." The light in the room temporarily bloomed as, outside, a passing void ship ignited its plasma engines and rocketed out of view. Beyond the armaglass windows one could watch all the void traffic that passed through Port Anvil and the star scape of mankind's galactic dominion that lay beyond.

"You can not be serious," said Salvarius in disbelief, "an Inquisitor is only as effective as his retinue, and you cannot expect me to deal with an obvious threat to the Imperium without all the resources of my position!" Salvarius was fuming at the absurdity of leaving his trusted agents behind, but he was especially furious he had to beg his old mentor for aids like some failed apprentice.

"I am serious, and do not sell yourself short," the Lord Inquisitor theatrically picked up and scanned an open velum folder who's contents she had memorized days ago. "You have bested an Aeldari pirate's scheme to cart off an entire world's population, killing him and shattering his fleet in the process, put a coven of Necron worshipping hereteks to the torch, and single handedly cut down the Ork Warlord Spine Krumpa'." She gave Salvarius a long and evaluative look, "You'll manage _just_ fine." Salvarius' knuckles were white as he nodded his reluctant admission. While he had technically been complimented, he could not shake the impression he had just been chided like a troublesome scholum brat.

"You have made your point, Lord Inquisitor. I only have one question then before I begin preparing: how has the last decade and a half treated my mentor?" The Lord Inquisitor's face, for the first time since he had arrived, showed emotion as it slowly contorted into a mask that lay somewhere between melancholy and grim resignation.

"Not well."


	2. Chapter 2

+++ System: Seers Eye / Aboard the _Quest's End_ +++

" _More than the xenos… more than the heretic... and more than the soulless, none are as deserving of the Inquisition's fury as those fools who would interfere with my duty."_

 _Inquisitor Velm Stronovo as he succumbed to an assassin's poison, M37_

"All hands, status report," dictated Captain Everstout to the scribe-servitor at his command throne's side. The lobotomized cyborg feverishly quilled a dozen separate transcriptions on sheets of recycled velum and placed them into brass capsules. The servitor placed these twelve containers into as many plasteel tubes which surrounded it, and the pull of vacuum sent them screeching throughout the _Quest's End._ Salvarius, dressed in the guise of a trade guild's representative, turned his gaze from the small viewport of the bridge to eye the curious bank of tubes and pumps around the Captain. Everstout caught his eye. "My mistress," the Captain said while patting his throne lovingly, "is an old matron, tradesman. She is not one to stray from tradition."

"My colleagues back on Port Anvil have much the same mind. She and her captain have my thanks for taking on a last-minute passenger. Remind me again: how long has the _Quest's End_ been in your family's fleet?" The disguised Inquisitor shivered slightly upon uttering the ship's name. Words held great power, and the ship's name boded poorly for his future.

"Four thousand, seven hundred and sixteen years, and in all that time she has served the clan peerlessly," Everstout recited with practiced solemnity. "Bravely serving the Emperor in all manners of frightfu- "

"Captain, long range auspex is reporting a contact along the ecliptic," droned the communication servitor, a freshly opened pneumatic cylinder held in its claws with its vellum contents exposed. The bridge crew snapped to attention as the captain tossed the vellum to his tactical officer.

"Give me an active scan at these coordinates," commanded Everstout.

"I thought no one else knew of this trade route, Captain," said Salvarius calmly.

"That's right. This route is a family secret, bought with a large fortune from a navigator house known for its tight lips." The tactical officer stood up from her station as her augur readout suddenly glared bright yellow with warning sigils.

"I am reading a large contact, frigate class, bearing 62 degrees and 1.4 million kilometers distant. Their right on top of us!"

"How in the warp did they get so close without us noticing them?" whispered Captain Everstout. "This can only be trouble. Bring all stations to yellow alert," he dictated, his servitor scrawling away.

"Somethings interfering with our augurs," said the tactical officer as she manipulated command sigils frantically. "I'm losing it!" Salvarius got out of his chair and leaned over the tactical officer's station.

"Looks like a dark field absorption pattern," he said with an air of unquestionable authority. The bridge crew did a double take on their passenger; the air Salvarius put off had shifted, and the man no longer seemed to fit in the poofy trader's robes he wore.

"Do you know something of this?" Everstout asked as a ghost of incredulous suspicion passed over his face.

"I have no connection with our visitor, if that is what you mean Everstout," Salvarius's eyes glowered darkly from their sockets at the captain, "but I can assure you that even if we try our Emperor given best to survive the coming hours, me may not." Salvarius pulled a small device from his robes: it was an irregular brick of circuitry, crystalline clockwork and small, writhing mechadendrites. A tech priest in the back of the bridge, all augmetics and glowing augurs, raised his cowl and emitted a sharp blurt of binary. Everstout gave the usually silent Mechanicus adept a sideways glance.

"Care to elaborate on that?"

"A device which very few in the Imperium have, and those that do jealously guard them from the servants of the Omnisiah," it spoke, its voice coming as if from a static laced vox emitter. Had anyone else in the room possessed a noospheric processor, they would have recognized that static was in fact a dense burst of binaric data that detailed all the priest knew of the object. What the priest had spoken in non-binary was the singular dreg of information he was willing to share with those not inducted into the Martian Cult.

"Very true, adept, very true. I take it your ship will be able to accept it?" asked Salvarius, his question directed more at the ship's enginseer than at its Captain.

"Doubtlessly."

"Wait, what are you going to do trader?" demanded Captain Everstout with exasperation. The tech priest raised his hand reassuringly.

"Please let the meat bag do as he wishes, Captain. I've always wanted to see such a device in action," there was a bizarre hunger in the priest's voice that Everstout had never heard before. Salvarius moved towards the tactical station.

"Wait!" barked the captain as he stood from his command throne. "Just who in the warp are you?" Silvarius reached into his robes and pulled out his sigil: the gold and vermillion "I" of the Inquisition, a skull emblazoned upon its center.

"I am an Inquisitor of the Ordo Xenos, Silvarius Ilsk. I am the Emperor's hand, and with my help we just might make it out of here alivel." The Inquisitor pivoted and placed the arcane brick atop the tactical console. The mass of bizarre mechanisms folded out in fractal patterns that covered the entire console, revealing a seemingly unending volume of mechanisms that integrated themselves into the cogitator. It took only twenty seconds for the tactical station to be covered by a technological lichen of lambently glowing gears and writhing circuitry, all the while the bridge crew stood dumbfounded. The terminal's display flickered, until it restored itself as an auger readout. On the display, where before there was nothing, was a rapidly closing contact labeled "Drukhari Vessel" along with a growing table of technical data. "The _Quest's End'_ s cogitators can now parse through the shadow field's disruption," said Salvarius, posed as if he could take on the world. "Now we stand a fighting chance."


	3. Chapter 3

+++ System: Seers Eye +++

" _They've come for your souls, I've seen it. They've come to feed on your souls…"_

 _Oelle Blackwinter, Primaris Psyker, M35_

The _Bechareth_ 's predatory form sliced through space, a spear head of emerald cloaked in a black death shroud. Against the star scape, the Drukhari vessel was a murderous blot that hungrily swallowed the light of distant suns shining behind it. It careened away from the plane of the ecliptic, its alien captain hoping to gain an angle on the unsuspecting Imperial trade galleon and take out its bridge in a single decapitating pass. It was a maneuver that had been tested hundreds of times before on far more competent prey, so when the Mon-keigh ship activated its void shield it gave the _Bechareth_ 's commander no pause. The Imperials had spotted the Drukhari far too late, and their meager defenses would not hold against a pinpoint barrage of Dark Light emitters.

The delicious screaming of slaves from the torture theater reached a heavenly crescendo, and pillars of unstable quasi-matter erupted from the nest of guns along the _Bechareth_ 's prow. But rather than hold course and lay into its target, the vessel swerved from its attack vector as a harrowing storm of macro munitions laced the void around it. The Drukhari helmsman, empowered by centuries of experience and alien archeotech, took mere microseconds to dance out of the way of each hab-block sized explosive shell that sought to strike his ship; it would only take a single direct hit to destroy the _Bechareth_ , but its crew would never give the Mon-keigh the chance. That is not to say they were not surprised on some level that the trade galleon had responded so quickly to their opening salvo, but the incredibly quick minds of the Drukhari brook no weakness or shock. As the _Bechareth_ plummeted towards its quarry from above the ecliptic, a shadow slipped from beneath it and shot for the heart of the trade galleon.

IIIIIII

"Just hit the damn thing, tactical. Its only one ship!" roared Captain Everstout over the din of Macro-weapon and defense weapon fire. The enginseer was screeching something about the void shields being near critical from the alien ships first shot, and the bridge was filled with the staccato flashes of weapons fire as emplacements along the ships dorsal surface sent fury downrange at the oncoming xenos ship. So far, the only good the _Quest's End'_ s weapons seemed to do was keep their attacker from lining up another shot.

"Something just detached off from their ship," bellowed the tactical officer, "Impact in two minutes!"

"A torpedo; helmsman, take evasive action!" The helmsman performed the laughable order to the best of his ability. The trade galleon was a lumbering behemoth, and there was nothing evasive about how its plasma drive strained to accelerate out of the oncoming object's path.

"The object just course-corrected, impact in one minute and thirty seconds," grunted the tactical officer. Salvarius gripped the hilt oh his bolt pistol as he watched the second signature grow closer on the altered augur display.

"That's no torpedo. Everstout, prepare your armsmen to repel borders," commanded the Inquisitor. Capsules were dispatched throughout the ship, although Salvarius doubted it would do them much good. There was no preparing for the Drukhari.

"Impact in five, four, three, two…" a shipquake rocked the decking. Amidst a plume of shattered armor and venting gas, a bulbous assault pod lay embedded in the ships dorsal surface. Damage reports came from throughout the ship.

"I am reading widespread power outages in the systems surrounding the crafts point of entry," piped the enginseer. "A full third of our weapon emplacements have lost functionality, and my adepts say the void shield's machine spirit is struggling to function." The tech priest rattled off a chain of binaric curses, "Those xeno meat bags have shunted power from my reactor into their pod!"

"That's the least of our problems," said Salvarius as he thumbed the activation stud on his rosarius. "Under the cover of the power outages, that bloated tick is disgorging a host of some of the most dangerous and heretical xenos of the galaxy into this ship." He threw off the last vestments of his disguise, revealing a form fitting pattern of carapace armor beneath and a bolt pistol and chainsword affixed to his waist. "I'm going down there to remove that damnable vessel manually. Who will guide me there?"

"Le Monte will," said Everstout, and one of his personal armsmen stepped from the side of the command throne. Le Monte was a middle aged-looking man with gleaming service studs in his forehead, and that told Salvarius that Le Monte was a veteran of Imperial service and a damn good one at that. He activated his armored void suits speaker.

"Follow me Inquisitor. We'll rendezvous with the defense teams and head there in force," said Le Monte, his voice rumbling like a Chimera's engine block. The ran out of the bridge, weapons at the ready, leaving the bridge to manage the desperate void battle.

IIIIII

"Augustine, you Emperor damned fuck, open the door!" Stubbs beat at the blast door like a caged animal. He could hear screams behind him, further down the maintenance corridor. The emergency lights were flickering in and out, and the air was starting to fill with smoke that made Stubbs wheeze between yelling at the man he would normally call a close friend. On the other side of the blast door, where the lights were still on and the air was clear, Augustine was curled up with his back against the door; his eyes were squeezed shut, and his hands covered his ears. He kept yelling something, but Stubbs couldn't hear him over the alarm klaxon. "Somethings coming Augustine! C'mon, open the door!" A sharp pain suddenly exploded in his left thigh, and Stubbs collapsed to the ground. He was so surprised that he didn't even scream, just lay there on the ground spasming.

"Oh ho ho, I do love the way you writhe on the ground like that," said an alien voice that was so sweet and playful it made Stubbs want to scream. But he couldn't; his jaw was locked shut, and he couldn't make a sound. A hazy figure stood above him, obscured by the smoke until it leaned down, and Stubbs saw it was dressed in what could only be described as a sadist's body armor: a black body glove fit with emerald, bladed armor plates covered with grisly trophies still wet with blood. It pressed a finger delicately on his lips as it raised a wicked knife dripping with venom and blood into view, "We don't want you screaming and ruining the mood, now do we?" That psychotically honied voice drilled into his mind as the knife vivisected his chest with nightmarish speed. He tried to yell, beg it to just kill him already, but he could not scream. His body would not let him. The monster reached into his upper chest and, with a pull here and a cut there, Stubbs suddenly felt his vocal cords, taught with a silent scream, go limp. It pulled its blood slick hands out of Stubbs and began to drag him with one hand away from the door, back down the maintenance hall. Stubbs' body was still spasming uncontrollably with pain, but as his head arched back he could see Augustine's face, now pressed against the view slit of the blast door. Stubbs pain numbed brain read his friend's screaming lips and finally knew what he'd been yelling on the other side of the door.

" _Don't let them take you alive."_


	4. Chapter 4

+++ System: Seers Eye / Aboard the _Quest's End_ +++

" _Fighting aboard a void ship is a lot like fighting in an underhive: dark, messy, and a misplaced shot can hit a bloody plasma line and cook your whole squad."_

 _Sergeant Martin "Crag Jaw" Dusk of the 3_ _rd_ _Hive Rats Regiment, M39_

"2 minutes till the station," said a voidsman over the tram's intercom. Salvarius Ilsk gripped the handrails of the personnel tram as it careened around a corner, the driver pushing the machine well beyond its limits. Glow globes from the tunnel lit the interior of the vehicle sporadically, casting dark shadows on the hundred odd armsmen crouching in the tram's three cars. Salvarius and Le Monte were in the middle tram, listening over short range vox as a radio team relayed messages the bridge sent via capsule.

"We've lost lost contact with the armsmen holding the tram station, so expect a welcoming committee," called out a scraggly vox-officer. Grunts of unease sounded down the tram as men passed the news between cars.

"What's your procedure for this?" asked Salvarius as he armed himself with both his chainsword and bolt pistol. Le Monte pointed at the turret mounted on the front car.

"Fill the air with flechettes and storm the station," he said, referring to the personal and heavy scattergun his men and the tram possessed respectively. "Can't make it more complicated than that without something going awry."

"30 seconds!" sounded the pilot. Salvarius looked out the tram window as they were thrust into darkness: all the lights were out, save for piddly emergency strobes and the headlights of the tram itself. The vehicle suddenly lurched as its automatic brakes tried to engage before its on board batteries kicked in.

"We're close to the boarding pod," Salvarius murmured. He looked down the length of the tram car and saw the armsmen were making signs of the Aquila and rubbing personal mementos for good luck. He briefly considered giving a rallying speech but realized the armsmen knew well what was at stake. _Quest's_ _End_ was crewed by families that had lived on her for centuries or even millennia, and everyone with him knew that to fall here would put their kin at the mercy of the barbarous fiends that now prowled the corridors of their ancestral home. A violet-tinged explosion rocked the tram as it shot around the final corner, and the turret on the front car lit up. Sheets of razor shrapnel went downrange, and the gun's muzzle flashes lit up the tunnel. Salvarius leaned against the armored cabin wall as the tram's windows shattered under a barrage of fire. The air over the ducking armsmen was filled with the pulsing whine of alien shard carbines and the vicious crystals of obscene toxins they fired. The Inquisitor's eyes narrowed as a sphere shot into the cabin and began letting out an opaquely white gas. Salvarius darted forward and kicked the grenade out a window, holding his breath as the residual gas was swept away by the air that now roared through the car. The tram's brakes engaged in a screech, and the armsmen flicked on their head mounted stab-lights.

Assorted battle cries went out and the armsmen rushed out the trams with scatterguns blazing, Salvarius at their head. Salvarius rapidly took in his surroundings: the bloody metal floor was littered with human and Drukhari bodies, and at least twenty of the xenos were firing from behind cargo crates that littered the loading platform. Barely fifty feet separated the armsmen from the xenos.

"Suffer not the alien to live!" cried the Inquisitor. He recited the psalm of Supreme Arrogance as he charged for the heart of the xenos, hoping to grab their attention. The Drukhari opened fire on him, hoping to shatter the assault force's momentum, but his rosarius converted the streams of crystalized toxin they shot at him into staccato bursts of golden light. What did get through dug harmlessly into the plates of his carapace armor. The men around him were not so blessed, and Salvarius saw a score of them collapse screaming in the first five seconds of the attack, toxic shards puncturing their scant armor and delivering nerve-scorch toxins directly into their bloodstream. The Drukhari faired better, performing what Salvarius saw as a perfectly executed fighting retreat through the main blast door that led away from the tram station. Though the aliens weaved between cover like razor-edged minnows in a pond, they could not avoid the volume of fire that the ship's defender's put out. The Drukhari seemed to shiver in ecstasy when they were hit, a realization that filled Salvarius with disgust, but they went down all the same as they were shot full of metallic darts or blown clean through by bolts from Salvarius' pistol. A particularly daring and scantily clad xenos broke from cover and in a tenth of a second was just a pace from Salvarius.

Her hand flicked a weird, semi-organic whip at his left leg; he attempted to dodge, but the whip reached for him like a living thing and wrapped his leg in a barbed embrace, tearing away cloth to reveal the metal of his bionic limb. Salvarius was numb to the bio-pulses he knew the device, which he recognized as an agoniser, was putting out, and wrenched his prosthetic leg backwards. This threw the surprised Whych off her balance, and Salvarius swung his chainsword at her midriff. The xeno let go of the agoniser and backflipped away, a spur on her heel catching his sword hand and sending his weapon flying. That display of acrobatic ability cost the Whych her life, as Salvarius shot her twice in the gut as she spun in the air. The bolt detonations sent her bloody viscera flying after her dark kin. Salvarius caught his spinning chainsword and ran after the few Drukari still visible down the corridor, the armsmen who had seen the exchange sticking close to the Inquisitor like predators gathering around their pack leader.

"You men stay with the wounded," ordered Le Monte to a hand-full of men as Salvarius and the remaining seventy armsmen charged down the hall. They had already lost twenty-four men to the horrific xenos weapons, and Le Monte knew that they had gotten off lightly. He hoped the other assault teams were faring as well.

IIIIIIIIIIIII

Salvarius' party was moving in force down a main passage way, following the readings of a dingy auspex that homed in on the energy signature of the enemy assault craft, when they heard a strange sound. Salvarius ducked behind a sturdy looking freight sentinel and the rest of his men followed suit. The Inquisitor waved over the auspex handler.

"Can you pick up bio-signatures with that?" he asked, nodding at the auspex. The bald-headed operator was about to shake his head when he squinted his eyes in thought and made adjusted a few dials on the device. He spoke a prayer of function to appease the device as its screen began to pop with static, and it resolved as a dark green display with colored blotches on it.

"The maintenance crews use this setting to detect electronics and pipes behind walls- the auspex's machine spirit will see anything puttin' off warmth. I never thought of it before, but I guess it'd work to find people to." Salvarius gave him a solid pat on the back.

"Good thinking armsman. Your making the emperor proud this day." He stepped back as the auspex handler gave a sweep of the surrounding walls. The man froze as his auspex reached the 11 O'clock position.

"I got something. Five, maybe six warm bodies, but they aint movin'.

"Breacher team, move in," commanded Salvarius. Five men moved up, and the rest followed in staggered waves, taking cover and aiming stablights and scatter guns down the corridors and chambers they passed. They hadn't run into any hostiles for ten minutes, and the Imperials were on edge. Le Monte took the door with the breacher team, and one of his men smacked the opening rune and peaked the doorway with a pocket mirror. Salvarius saw the armsman scrunch his eyebrows before his eyes went wide and his skin became pale as bone. That's when the smell hit Salvarius: the stinging smell of blood, like something from a corps starch refinery.

"A-a-all clear," breathed the armsman with the mirror, and the breacher team moved in. Salvarius followed, and almost ran into Le Monte's backside. He pushed one of the armsmen out of the way and his hard eyes saw the bodies. There were five of them, human beings so horribly disfigured they could not be called alive, save for the fact that they still writhed. They were all pinned wickedly with barbs and chains to the floor and walls, their blood-caked lips screaming silently as their exposed insides pulsed. One of the armsman's guns clattered to the ground as he stumbled towards one of them.

"Jr? Stubbs my boy, is that you?" the armsman mumbled in shock. He shakily moved to pull on one of the barbs holding a vivisected body in place. Salvarius tried to stop him, a dark epiphany striking like a bolt of lightning.

"Stop!" A flash, the feeling of being slammed backwards as an intense heat scalded his body. Salvarius entertained the feeling that he was flying in the air, his senses scattered like ash in the wind.

IIIIIIIIIIIII

Salvarius opened his eyes and for a moment thought he had been buried alive. He was suffocating; everything was black. He flailed his arms against the great mass on top of him, and terror's talons gripped Salvarius' heart. After struggling for what felt like minutes, he managed to wriggle out from under the mass of metal and cloth on top of him. It was pitch black; not even the emergency lights were on. Salvarius gripped his forehead and vomited onto the steel decking as a wave of nausea overcame him. He clicked open an armored container at his waist and pulled out a stim patch which he slapped onto his wrist. His head cleared rapidly, and he fumbled on the ground for a light source. The Inquisitor found the hilt of his bolt pistol, clasping it and thumbing the under-barrel flash light. The first thing he saw was the shape that had almost crushed him: It was Le Monte, or his body at any rate. His armored void suit's frontal plate was caved in and blackened, and his helmet's armaplas visor had melted onto his skull. Salvarius swung his pistol behind him and saw that the doorway to the room he had been in was a slagged ruin. A blackened char was all that remained inside.

"Emperor damn me for my incompetence. I should have known that charnel house was booby trapped," he whispered solemly. He looked back at the blackened body of the man who had taken the brunt of the explosion for him and made the sign of the Aquilla. "Thank you, Le Monte. Emperor keep you." It was then that Salvarius realized he was perfectly alone. He cast his light down the corridor he was standing in and saw splatters of gore and blood all over the walls and floor but scant few bodies. Those that lied in sight were an even distribution of alien and human. The Inquisitor supposed the xenos had attacked and overcome the armsmen when the explosive went off and carted off the tortured survivors to Emperor knows where.

He stayed deathly silent and looked around for his chainsword. Salvarius found it in pieces, its mechanisms and toothed belt spilt over the floor like an animal's intestines. He saw a disturbingly barbed, serpentine blade buried in a dead man's chest. He pulled it free, gave it a couple experimental swings: it was perfectly balanced, and Salvarius had no doubt it was sharper than a churgeon's scalpel. He took a few more minutes to find a satchel of demolition charges an armsman had been carrying and hefted it onto his aching shoulders. The Inquisitor's whole body throbbed with pain, and one of his ribs felt like it was broken, but he endured it. Salvarius had one more duty to perform, and a small shipquake shook the decking as if to drive home the point.

The Inquisitor would blow that damn boarding ship off the _Quest's_ _End_ if it was the last thing he did.


	5. Chapter 5

+++ System: Seer's Eye+++

" _Don't you dare rat out yer ol' man, kiddo. If the Inquisition hears that I been stealing rations from the food depot they'll kill me, and then they'll kill you and your Mum just to make a bloody point."_

 _A paranoid thief to his son, M34_

"The xenos ship is coming around for another pass," said the tactical officer, her right arm in a sling from when the enemy last enfiladed them with their abominable beam weaponry. She hoped the counter-assault teams were close to getting that bulbous tick of a boarding craft off, because with a third of her gun emplacements out of power the _Quest's End_ was as good as dead.

"Fires spreading on subdeck 3 of deck 12, and cargo holds 7 and 8 have been opened to the void," announced the communications servitor flatly.

"There goes a fifth of our profits," growled Captain Everstout darkly. "Depressurize that subdeck immediately."

"Estimates of the surviving crew in subdeck 3 of deck 12 exceed three hundred. Confirm order." The servitor pulled out a unique, onyx capsule from a rack and placed a sheet of velum detailing the section to be consigned to the void within it.

"Send the order," commanded Captain Everstout without hesitation. His heart grew heavy as the death-black capsule raced down the pneumatic tube, and he placed his hand subconsciously against the puckered burn scar on his left arm. He knew what fire did to a ship, and he _knew_ evacuating the air from the burning subdeck was a mercy to those trapped inside; that did not make killing them any easier. A thought crossed the Captain's mind, and he ordered one of his aids to grab the system's stellar map. He was handed a tablet with a sculpted silver frame, and he pressed his signet ring into a slot in the device's side. A flash of his family's insignia on the screen came and went, and he gazed upon a navigational display of the Seer's Eye system. He selected a gas giant in the middle reaches of the system, no more than a few million kilometers from _Quest's End_ , and soaked in the technical data of the planet with a voidsman's eye.

"Helmsman," he barked while sending a data packet to his officer's station, "set a course for SE Delta along this heading." The helmsman was ensconced in his armored capsule, dozens of implanted neuro-feeds connecting him to the _Quest's End_ , so Everstout could not see the look of concern that came over his helmsman's face. What was the Captain thinking?

"Aye, Captain. Bringing the ship about." The dull rumble of the ship's fusion drive quieted for a few minutes as retro-thrusters and macro-gyros spun the trade galleon. The gunnery crews kept up their fusillade of withering but futile macro-cannon fire at the encircling Drukhari ship, lest it take advantage of the _Quest's End'_ s stillness. Then the sound of the engines rose through the decking as a bone shaking roar as the ship's plasma drive was thrown into the red; the _Quest's End_ accelerated hard towards a nearby gas giant, and this made the captain of the _Bechareth_ pause. What vain and desperate attempt at survival was this?

The alien captain cooed quietly atop its throne. It loved when the prey struggled: it made the otherwise dull act of contract killing so much more enjoyable. An Inquisitor's head and a vessel's worth of slaves filled the pocket, but it was moments like this, when the alien was engaged in a life or death battle with dangerous prey, that made its vocation as a pirate so very worthwhile. The Drukhari captain ordered the helmsman to maintain pursuit as it pondered what the pitiful Monk-keigh were planning.

IIIIIIIIIIIII

Salvarius edged around the corner and aimed down the service corridor with his bolt-pistol. The affixed stab light revealed more blood slick walls and piping but was otherwise empty. The Inquisitor stalked down the hallway. He no longer knew where he was going, only that the screaming was getting louder.

He had noticed it as he had crawled under a caved in section of hull plating and his ear was pressed against the floor: somewhere, their sounds of anguish reverberating through the metal bones of the ship, a great many men and women were screaming in unimaginable pain. The blood curdling sound was almost lost amidst the distant rumble of the ship's engines, but as Salvarius continued he recognized that it was becoming louder. The architecture of the labyrinthine void ship should have scattered the sound and made it impossible to trace, Salvarius thought. Perhaps the stories of old ships like the _Quest's End_ possessing something of a soul, and guiding their crew in strange ways, had some truth to them?

The sounds of tortured anguish were becoming more distinct, and Salvarius flicked his stab light off. His eyes adjusted rapidly, but not soon enough as a phantom shadow passed in front of the strobes on the corridor's far end. Then another, and another; Salvarius made a split-second decision and aimed his bolt pistol down the corridor.

"Pyro-acid," he whispered, and his bolt pistol of unusual pattern and bulk whirred quietly as internal ammo stores and automatic feeds shifted. Salvarius exhaled, squared his feet, and pulled the trigger.

The muzzle flash lit up the hallway, revealing no less than eight Drukhari forms turning into the corridor that Salvarius stood in. A second light, moving so fast that it was barely perceptible, traced a path into the heart of the Drukhari squad as the bolt round's rocket engine flared. Then the bolt round, crafted in a remote Ordo Xenos research station and filled to the brim with a rare sample of Tyranid pyro-acid, impacted with one of xenos. The bolt shattered armor and penetrated reactive fiber-weave, but the round's mass reactive explosive detonated before the bolt could drive into its victim. This caused the pressurized ampule of pyro-acid within the bolt to shatter and disperse its contents rapidly in the air. In the following seconds what scant armor the now flailing xenos wore was eaten through and reduced to acrid fumes, and their flesh was broken down into combustibles and oxides by the Tyranid liquid. The resulting air-born cocktail bloomed into fiery life, and the few Drukhari who had avoided being splattered with the pyro acid were incinerated by the heat that resulted from the very air being set alight. A single raider had avoided being killed outright, and as its charred form scrambled from the crawling flames that had erupted from nowhere and annihilated its squad, the raider's head was lopped off by a strike it never saw coming.

Salvarius ran through the flames the pyro-acid had born, the fresh blood on his Drukhari blade steaming. He flicked the light on his pistol as he emerged from the inferno; the boarders knew he was hear now, so stealth was out of the question. He thumbed a switch on the bolt pistol, and its mechanisms reloaded the standard ammunition, which he quickly fired into a Drukhari that emerged from the T-section ahead. The alien slumped over, its chest cavity emptied of their contents even as it fired its splinter rifle in a death grip. The Inquisitor reached the T-section and took a left, from where his dead foe had come from; sure enough, there were bright lights up ahead as the corridor opened into a larger space. Salvarius crossed the threshold and beheld a bizarre spectacle.

Below him, in a disheveled weapon's chamber with a gargantuan macro cannon's mechanism hanging from the ceiling, hundreds of voidsmen walked wide circles as their bodies spasmed with pain and they moaned and screamed from some unseen torment. In the midst of the crowd, its six mismatched arms waving in the air like a crazed conductor in time with the sounds of pain, floated a bizarre and skeletal creature. Its face looked like a mad man's rendition of a human face, gaunt as death and with a predator's black eyes; what hair it did have plastered to its pale scalp was wispy and white. Just as Salvarius aimed his pistol down at the creature, the xenos looked up at him with a bemused face.

"Now now Inquisitor, do not be so quick to end my fun," the haemonculus pined in a silky voice as it raised its four upper arms in time with a particularly harsh roar of pain from the enthralled humans. "I promise I can put on for you a show beyond anything your primitive mind could ever dream up. Just stand their and watch as I make these little meat puppets _sing_!" The monster's words confirmed Salvarius' suspicions: the Drukhari had known he was onboard, and doubtlessly attacked the _Quest's End_ with that in mind. Salvarius fired a bolt round at the monster's distended torso, more to distract it than with any real hope of hitting it. The bolt round connected, despite the span between Salvarius and his target, but the consequences were far from expected.

A woman in the crowd, dressed in the dingy overalls of a welder, collapsed as her chest exploded in a gory shower of flesh and blood. Salvarius stood aghast as the haemonculus scoffed in irritation.

"I told you to not ruin my fun, Mon-keigh." Salvarius, a coldness growing in his chest, fired two more shots at the creature as he stalked down a stairway to the main floor where the haemonculus stood amongst its horrific orchestra. Both shots landed squarely on target with the bolts exploding deep in the Drukhari's warped body, and again two more voidsmen died as they were ripped asunder by unseen forces. An unknowable look crossed the aliens face before its thin lips stretched into an image of mock glee.

"I see now: you want to add your own touch to my musical piece! I am flattered Inquisitor, humbled even; join me as I progress to the next movement," chortled the xeno, and its arms moved to a swift rhythm that caused the crowd to cry out in tempo with the rise and fall of its hands. The Inquisitor stood quietly, his eyes scanning the creature's body for anything that would betray what was protecting the haemonculus. Despite his years of research and fighting against the splintered Aeldari race, he had never encountered or heard reports of anything like this. The hopelessness of the situation struck the Inquisitor, but it slid off his psyche like water off plasteel. He raised his voice above the crowd, his voice deadpan and in his best imitation of an Imperial Noble. Dealing with the arrogant upper crust of the Imperium might just pay-off in the most bizarre of ways.

"I am unimpressed haemonculus. I have seen more artful displays from those of the Hex Coven; furthermore, I think that your conduction is horribly uninspired. Is this all you can manage, or do you plan on boring me to death?"

The haemonculus froze for half a second before it resumed its orchestration, its lips curling back to reveal a mouth crowded with mismatched teeth.

"You think yourself a critic, Inquisitor? That you are worthy to judge the works of an artist such as myself?" It laughed darkly, "My musicians might just object to your _unenlightened_ review." With a twirl of his hands, the enthralled men and women closest to Salvarius began to twitchily walk towards him with arms outstretched. One of them, an old man with a greying beard stained with machine oil, lunged forward. Salvarius sidestepped and dived into the crowd, his eyes darting from person to person as he dodged the thralls that drunkenly attacked him even as his voice remained steady and loud.

"I would hardly call you an artist, xeno," said Salvarius flatly. He noticed that the thralls around him stumbled for a second as their master's concentration broke. "Making a bunch of humans dance in circles can hardly be called art, let alone impressive. Shouldn't someone as old as yourself be able to come up with something more tasteful? Or is that head of yours all out of good ideas?" A blast of violet dark light scythed through a clump of thralls near him as Salvarius ducked. He looked over the bodies as he continued running and saw a smoking pistol in one of the haemonculus' hands. The rest of the hands kept up the movement of the thralls while the alien shot at Salvarius. The next shot did not miss, and it was only by the grace of Salvarius' refractor field that he survived.

"Maybe you should rethink your line of work," commented Salvarius as he looked the Drukhari abomination dead in the eyes, "because I've seen more talent for art from an under-hive pole dancer." With that, the glazed look on the enthralled voidsmen broke and, to a man, they collapsed in exhaustion and shock around Salvarius. Salvarius flinched back as the haemonculus rocketing towards him as it let out a roar of fury. It grabbed him by the scruff of his coat and flung him fifteen feet away as it uttered a curse in its terrible tongue.

Salvarius' landing was softened by the bodies he landed on, although he did feel bones break beneath him. He stood up and laughed, grimly surprised that his gambit had paid off: the ego of the haemonculii was legendary, and no shield imaginable could protect that. The Inquisitor fired a few shots at the enraged xeno as it charged towards him, but he couldn't score a hit before his magazine emptied. Salvarius holstered the pistol and adopted a fencer's stance with his alien blade, and as the haemonculus lashed out with wickedly weaponized limbs he expertly parried the assault. Salvarius was forced to give ground as the alien kept up its attack, and even dodged to the side as it surged through the air with outstretched claws. Salvarius was landing hits, but they might as well have been scratches to the painless and wrathful creature. What was important was that the meager wounds proved whatever protection the alien had was tied to its orchestration, and it was now vulnerable. When the haemonculus swiped with its three right limbs, Salvarius ducked into its guard and swiped at the alien's legs, severing both at the hip. Rather than an arterial spray, only a dribble of milky ichor wept from the wound.

The haemonculus was completely unfazed and grabbed the Inquisitor in all of its arms and hoisted him high off the ground. Salvarius cried out in agony as his right shoulder was crushed in the vice like grip of the creature, and its claws sank deep into his flesh and stabbed organs deeply.

"This is but a taste of your new existence as my play thing, Mon-keigh," whispered the alien darkly as its grip tightened. "Your world will become pain and torment, and you will learn to respect your betters."

"Not today xenos," spitted Salvarius through clenched teeth. He slammed his left knee into the creature's torso and mentally triggered the directional explosive attached at the bionics' knee joint. The resulting detonation shot straight through the haemonculus' spine and into its brain pan, vaporizing its head and most of its organs. Salvarius crashed to the ground after the thing's grip loosened. Salvarius breathed in sharply as all his wounds screamed with pain, dimly aware that the alien's corpse still floated above him. He tried to stand up, but he collapsed to the ground when he tried to put weight on his left leg: the explosion had sheared the bionic leg off at the knee. So, he crawled into a sitting position, heaving the bag of explosives off his back even as his right shoulder threatened to make him black out from pain.

The explosives inside the bag were still in good shape, and with the haemonculus gone Salvarius could now focus on what he'd been guarding: the Drukhari boarding pod's proboscis, which was currently embedded in a high wall. The lights on the exposed portion of the craft were what had lit the space even as it drained the power from the surrounding lumens. The proboscis was too high up; the Inquisitor could not reach it in his condition.

It might have been the blood loss, but Salvarius Ilsk could have sworn he could hear the voice of armsmen behind him. His dimming mind did not particularly care, as he lost consciousness slumped against the bag of explosives, his body too drained of energy and vitae to keep going.

IIIIIIIIIIIII

The bridge received the capsule from the defense teams just as the ship entered the radiation belt surrounding the gas giant.

"That son of a bitch did it," breathed the Captain. He looked at his expectant bridge crew, "The defense teams found the Inquisitor unconscious and barely alive, having slain the xenos abomination that was guarding the boarding pod's entry point single handedly. They should be jettisoning the boarding pod any moment now."

As if on cue, a series of detonations around the entry point of the alien boarding craft lit up the vessel's hull, and the bloated mass drifted away slowly. Defense guns, their power restored and eager for retribution, bracketed the alien vessel with melta, las, and missiles. It was a shredded wreck in seconds, and though its demise was glorious Captain Everstout planned to make that merely the preamble to his next move. He ordered the defense teams to sweep the _Quest's_ _End_ for any surviving borders and ordered the enginseer to execute the ruse they had spent the last hours planning.

IIIIIIIIIIIII

The _Bechareth's_ captain was livid. The Mon-keigh had slain its boarding party, somehow dispatching the haemonculus it had spent many slaves to procure and destroyed the parasite ship that had crippled the trade galleon's weapon systems. Furthermore, the target ship had sequestered itself in the radiation soaked magnetic field of the system's gas giant; the _Bechareth_ was an in-system void raider that was could not operate in such a radioactive environment without risking serious system damage. The radiation also made it difficult to accurately scan the Mon-keigh vessel, so the Drukhari only had a rudimentary idea of what transpired over on the prey ship. The alien captain was about to order a costly return to Commorragh when the Dark Muses bestowed a blessing upon him: elements of the boarding team must sill be alive, because the reactor levels of the trade galleon suddenly dived to almost zero, the lights on its decks going out in waves as darkness engulfed the ship.

Too eager to recoup the cost of the mission, the captain of the _Bechareth_ ordered his crew to prepare boarding pods. They would perform a decapitating strike and take out the trade galleon's bridge; then they would then be free to dive in and out of the radiation belt at their leisure and take as many slaves as they wished, all while hunting down the Inquisitor they had been hired to kill.

As the Drukhari void ship dived toward the Imperial vessel and entered the radiation belt, their sensors dropped to minimal efficiency as they were bombarded with high energy particles. The alien captain again regretted not procuring better equipment for this run but promised themselves they would do so when they next returned to Commorragh.

Then a Macro Cannon shell the size of hab-block split the _Bechareth_ in twain and annihilated any hope its crew had of returning to the Dark City.

IIIIIIIIIIIII

The destruction of the alien ship by the captain's clever but simple deception roused a cheer as news spread throughout the _Quest's End,_ although the cheering quickly died down out of fear that as-of-yet undiscovered xenos still lurked in the darkness of the ship. There was still work that needed to be done, repairs that needed to be made and enemies that had to be flushed out of the depths of the vessel, but the Imperial citizens who called the _Quest's_ _End_ their home were glad they had held fast against the invaders. Victory celebrations would come, certainly, but only after everything else had been taken care of.

One passenger aboard the _Quests End_ would not be taking part in whatever festivities would come: Inquisitor Salvarius Ilsk. Out of everyone on the ship, he most of all had earned a reprieve; instead, he was fighting for his life on a medicae table as surgeons and servitors struggled desperately to keep him in the world of the living.

IIIIIIIIIIIIIIII

 _So this is the end of the first arc in Salvarius Ilsk's Tale. This isn't the first story I've written, or even the first one set in Warhammer 40k, but it is the first one I have had the enough confidence in to publish online. I hope whoever reads this has at least enjoyed reading these chapters as much as I have loved writing them. Thank you for taking the time out of your day to read my little story, and please leave a review on how you think of the story so far._

 _Until next time,_

 _Owl_


	6. Chapter 6

" _In the darkest night, look to your own hands for salvation,"_

 _-Lost Queen of Praxus, M38_

A brown gust of smog buffeted the landing pad. Salvarius stuffed the chem-plugs into his nostrils while he held onto the railing with his new augmetic arm, the blue chrome contrasting with the rust-eaten iron.

"Reminds me why I stay on the ship," laughed Captain Everstout. His green overcoat accentuated his void-pale face, drawing the eye to his golden hair and angled cheekbones like the frame of a painting. The captain was carrying a large case in one hand whose contents Salvarius had let go unasked. The star captain raised an eyebrow at their reception; or rather, the lack thereof. "Where the hell is your contact? If we stay out here any longer we'll catch rust lung and keel over."

"I don't know," admitted the Inquisitor reluctantly. He had spent the last two months recovering in the _Quest's End's_ medicae, and he'd only been conscious for the last two weeks. He wasn't sure what to do: the xenos attack meant there was a spy in the Ordo, and his mission was certainly compromised, but what else could he do but continue? He had sent for new orders via astropath to no avail, and his guts were twisted into painful knots. Was the lack of response due to casual warp-interference, or was something larger at work? Salvarius didn't know, and that frightened him. The sound of an engine from the dense industrial fog roused him.

"That must be them," he said. A two-story behemoth breached the fog, a bunker on tracks covered in fire points and reactive-armor plating. It crawled to the landing pad, billowing smoke from tall stacks. The side airlock swung open and shed light onto the cracked earth.

"Negotiator Dominguez and company, this is Enforcer Car 234. Please approach with your hands and luggage clearly visible," crackled a voice from an unseen vox-speaker. Everstout stood confused for a second, then remembered the Inquisitor was traveling under a pseudonym.

"That's our ride." Salvarius looked over his shoulder at the voidsman, "if your still up for this, that is." Everstout nodded his head hurriedly, eyes agleam. "Good. Let's not keep Torredor waiting."

IIIIII

Ugni ran down the causeway, black rain stinging her eyes. This high up in the mountains, where the noble houses dwelt, the only sign of the global pollution was ash carried up by storm clouds.

"Stop or you will be fired upon!" The order boomed from the gunship above her, its searchlight blinding her if she tore her eyes from the ground. Ugni asked herself how the mission had gone to shit so quickly, and swore she'd beat the answers from Torredor when she escaped. _If_ she escaped. "This is your last warning. In the name of House Rochester, stop and put your hands up!"

Ugni slid to a halt in the ashen mud. Her eyes flicked up: the train tunnel was a hundred meters away. Too far to run. She held up clenched fists, but kept facing the tunnel mouth. She dimly perceived the gunship pilot speaking, the whine of the gunship's multilaser building up power. They were all drowned out by the sound of the roaring fire in her head, a flame she stoked with soul-stuff and billowed with thoughts of violence. Just as the gunship pilot was pulling the trigger on the joystick, Ugni let the fire out.

The rain vaporized with a thunderclap. The gunship was launched upwards by a geyser of steam that came from nowhere, the pilot frantically bullying the controls to keep the gunship from flipping over even as his canopy cracked under the pressure.

Ugni stumbled through the steam, barely standing on leaden legs. She followed the tracks until she was in the tunnel and collapsed. There was a crash outside, followed later by an explosion so hot she crawled forward for fear of being burnt. She picked up her head and slowly, carefully, stood up. She had a long way to go, and she wouldn't make it crawling on her belly.

IIIIII

 _It has been a long time since I've posted on here. Life got away from me for a while and I've spent the last year putting it back together; now that I'm settled, I thought I should continue this story. I hope you all enjoy this piece, and I would love any critics or reviews you send my way._

 _Have a Happy New Year,_

 _Owl_


End file.
